Los Angeles Unified School District To Use Microsoft’s Office 365

It seems that Microsoft might have something to celebrate, according to a recent announcement made by the company. It turns out that Microsoft and the Los Angeles Unified School District have managed to come to an agreement in which it will see the entire district use Microsoft’s Office 365 as its cloud-based email solution for staff members and students.

It is actually not common to see schools, universities, and institutions rely on services from Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft for their email solutions. Heck, I remember back in college when Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail was used, and followed by Gmail for university.

Ron Chandler, the CIO for the district, made a statement in which he said, “With Office 365, we are supported by an integrated communication and collaboration platform that helps us work more efficiently and deliver better outcomes for teachers, administrators and students. It also aligns with our vision for the district to move away from relying solely on our datacenter; the cloud enables us to free up resources and devote them to other mission-critical activities.”

Like we said earlier, there are many cloud-based solutions out there, such as Google who has cloud-based services like Gmail and Google Drive where word documents and spreadsheets can be prepared, shared, and collaborated on at the same time by multiple parties.

However Microsoft’s Office 365 offers added features that allows the district to connect remotely with teachers and staff, keeping them informed of any breaking news and the likes. The added multi-factor authentication will also help beef up security, all of which might have contributed to the LAUSD’s decision.

Perhaps it might also be the familiarity of Microsoft’s services and products that might have helped with the decision. Just yesterday it was suggested that more enterprises were turning to the Windows Phone platform because of tight back-end integration, so we wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the reasons.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Microsoft, office 365